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Darpa’s Mad Scientists Wire Up the Internet, Put GPS in Space

Ask Tony Tether, former head of the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, what the shop has accomplished in the past two decades and he’ll give you a list of 11 projects that sound insane: self-assembling spacecraft, hyperspeed vaccines, artificial limbs controlled by the mind. Ask him why he listed 11 items and Tether answers, “Well, 11 is a prime number and many believe that the universe really has 11 dimensions.”

But don’t get thrown by the Fringe talk. As mad as Darpa’s scientists may be, their research underpins our world. The best-known example is the Internet itself: Darpa funded its precursor in the ’60s after recruiting a computer scientist who had wildly predicted that in the future, “human brains and computing machines will be coupled,” even over long distances. A little while after that, another Darpa-backed researcher publicly debuted a radical new way for people to interact with computers—using a mouse, hyperlinks, and windows.

Darpa also helped launch the first global positioning satellite and shrank GPS receivers down to a useful size. Without these developments, you’d likely still be lost somewhere in Alabama. Automatic speech recognition and translation algorithms flowered with Darpa investment. Your self-parking—even self-driving—car? Thank Darpa for repeated pushes to make vehicles that don’t require a pair of hands on the steering wheel.

Of course, there have been flops. (For example, the nuclear hand grenade.) And some of Darpa’s technology doesn’t extend beyond purely military applications. Oh, and it’s not always a speedy process. Take the Predator drones—Darpa-funded engineers built their ancestors in the 1970s. But that’s not because Darpa’s lunacy is folly. Sometimes it just takes a while for the world to catch up to it.